I have always wished I knew something more about electronics. The wife and I have lived on our Passport 45 Ketch, S/V Katie Lee most of these past 17 years. Hobbies have to be small, an since we are 'subsistence living', inexpensive. Ha!

Friday, September 30, 2011

I've been really busy lately. We moved out of the apartment and back on/in to the boat. But an order did come in the morning of the move. I only had a chance to verify that it was a fun box, before I had to close it up and get to work!
It mostly was more stuff for building boards and SMD part sets plus a new Arduino clone from Evil Mad Scientists, the Daivolino. I had bought a datalogger shield back when I first started on the AmpHour project, but have not gotten around to testing it because of having to figure out how to connect it to my plain boards. So the $10 daivolino looked just too good. And it is. 20 minutes to solder up in the new panavice Jr.

I had to hook it to something so there was the new blue/white 4x20 LCD display! A url on the package had the Arduino LCD test suite. It passed all tests and is simple to use. It does consume too many pins though.

The package of jumper wires are really nice to use with the breadboard!

4x20 ran all the examples

Then on to the datalogger. It has a real time clock chip besides the SD card holder, so I ran all the arduino IDE tests for each part. It too worked well and easy. One note, the CS chip_select in the IDE tests is set to pin 4 but the Adafruit datalogger uses pin 10. it only took about 15 minutes of digging to find that.

Adafruit's datalogger shield attached

So I have lots to play with and no time to play! The ACS714 current sensor below is still packed in a box, as are the 758's 100 and 150 amp sensors.

About Me

Larry & Trinda bought their Passport 45 Ketch in 1997. They started sailing westward from Seattle in 2000, pausing briefly in Mexico, the South Pacific, Hawaii, Cooks, Samoa, Tuvalu, Kiribati, Marshals, Micronesia, Palau and Philippines in 2011. Then on to Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines again and Taiwan in 2017